Children as young as eight should be given the cholesterol-lowering drugs statins to reduce their risk of heart disease, say doctors.

A week after the Government’s heart adviser caused controversy by suggesting every man over 50 and every woman over 60 should take a daily statin, researchers in the Netherlands recommend that the medication should be offered to children at high risk.

But unlike Professor Roger Boyle, who argued that a blanket approach to treatment of heart disease in middle age would be the most effective strategy, the Dutch researchers do not suggest handing out statins so freely.

They recommend the treatment only for those children with a genetic condition called familial hypercholesterolemia (FH), which causes very high levels of low density lipoprotein cholesterol, commonly called “bad” cholesterol, from birth onwards. Click here for full article